First off love the pod casts, but today's was hard, almost painful to listen to as the audio quality was not what I had come to expect from you guys....

As for Amtrak, it has been ten years but I did have the opportunity to travel long haul sleeper class from Denver to Washington DC via Chicago on the California Zephyr and Capitol Limited routes. I then continued standard coach up to Conn. on the Vermonter, another short connection on the Vermonter to Springfield Mass. to Connect to the Lake Shore limited in coach, and then back to Denver on the California Zephyr.

It was an interesting experience, and I really liked it though I had interesting issues to contend with, I would not classify it as a "standard" trip (At least I hope not) I did spend time in the first class lounge in Chicago as well.

If you are interested in hearing my thoughts, please feel free to email me (That way I don't bore people here.)

@Nathaniel and the Anonymous person that wrote in - apologies for the sound quality. I think when we are traveling and dont have access to our normal equipment we will just have to skip recording for that week. I tried to clean the audio as much as I could. Promise to do better moving forward!

How do you manage the recording and so forth? I figured you were all on Skype or something and someone was capturing the stream. I'd be interested to see the technical details, even though I'm not a pro audio person.

@kd5mdk yes, we are all on Skype. I have a USB mixer with a condensor mic that allows the Skype call and my conversation to be recorded to my computer. I use Audacity to do the actual recording. This results in a very clear and clean audio recording.

When on the road, I use Skype Call Recorder to record the conversation. However my laptop and/or the Skype Call Recorder software doesn't keep up with the audio stream and results in the choppy recording.